Before 24 Billion and Counting

Chapter 4 Part 2 Charles re-establishes his minds composure

The searchlight of the morning came as the window shades were lifted. We mumbled our good mornings and took our turns in the queues for the ablutions, making the usual slightly botch job of washing and shaving provoked by the small cubicle and the unfamiliar tools, where you suddenly seemed to be possessed of an extremely clumsy extra elbow. I looked at the face that for some thirty years I had shaved. It was tired, balding, lined, and grim. Thankfully healthy enough, but it could do with a smile. I gave it one. The man in the mirror grimaced back. I thought, "Don't try that on anyone you like." 

As the routines of breakfast, getting settled for the approach to Heathrow and the final landing proceeded, I wondered how I could shake off the current mood which could fatally damage a meeting with new people. I wanted to meet Alicia in good mental order. Not because I saw her as an adversary but because I wanted to find out a lot more about her as a person than just accepting a manuscript for review would merit. 

Landing at about 11 a.m., I would be in my hotel and booked into the room by about lunch time, with notionally a spare afternoon and evening. Had it been Los Angeles or Sydney I had many good friends, but England had become a bit of an anathema to the creative arts world from where most of my contemporary friends were drawn. It had solved many of the problems imposed by the crowded island it was, but only by considerable regimentation. The anarchic element of artistic thinking had been eroded by the intellectual rigidity of the culture and completely unapologetic political and moral censorship. 

I had many acquaintances there, but for this kind of help, friends were needed. I had to effect my own cure. 

Even though England had little to offer in the contemporary fine arts, it still had enormous amounts of heritage, it was clean and well organised and polite, and it needed foreign exchange. It thus served the tourist well and therefore I liked landing at Heathrow. 

The huge airport was always being remodelled. I tried to recall a time when I hadn't had to walk alongside kilometers of featureless temporary plywood walls thinly disguised with paint and an applique of posters with "So and So apologise for any inconvenience during the construction of terminal n." Today So and So was Laing and n was 12, but there had been Wimpey for 11 and Trafalgar House for 10. Nevertheless we were funnelled to the right place for our luggage which arrived promptly and undamaged. We were examined with exquisitely polite rigour by customs, security and immigration, and then set free to use the transport system. 

One of the solutions to pollution that had been arrived at by  

England was to entirely abolish the private car south of Watford Gap. There were three ways out of Heathrow. The computer driven - taxi system - now I noted called Comtaxi, the pilotless bus, or the subway. I suppose you could walk out too but there were no routing instructions for pedestrians. Despite all, the very influential could command a limousine but I had rarely seen one. I could only assume that the powerful and affluent had moved to using helicopters. Certainly there were were a lot of them to be seen, and many of the spot interviews with politicians and such in London were on windy rooftops. I reflected with irony that the powerful always polluted. The hydrocarbon fuel burnt by the meanest helicopter was an order of magnitude greater than that 

consumed by a car. 

I decided to take the tube, which was the Londoners quaint term for underground railway. It was usually quickest, and the White House Hotel was reasonably near a station. 

Parts of the tube were well over 100 years old, although the link to Heathrow was more modern. The rolling stock was of course modern, but although fast, the unyielding steel wheels on steel track, and the small diameter of the tunnel made for a roaring, banging, rolling, hot journey. Passengers swung on straps like so many carcases on butchers hooks, and suffered in silence, plugged themselves into CD players, or read. A woman tried to comfort her child in arms across the corridor from me. I tried to visualise how the stimuli of that journey would impact on the delicate nervous system and brain, as yet unable to set the experience in context, and came to the conclusion that it would seem like several kinds of hell.